Sadly...I Don't Know Everything...

There have been many instances in the writing center when students have come in with papers that seem to me written in a completely foreign language. The majority of these cases have been with students somehow involved in the health or medical majors. The long terms that seem to have one too many consonants in them are basically impossible for me to pronounce, much less define. However, as I have gone through these sessions, I have realized that it is largely unneeded for me to absolutely know what those terms mean (good thing too). The majority of the time, the paper in question still has many of the same stylistic and organizational problems that any English 1010 paper has, allowing the tutor to focus on more the writing aspect of the paper rather than the subject matter. However, whenever one of these sessions creep up, I always make sure to preface my advice by telling the student that I really have no experience in their discipline. Basically, if they have a question about the subject matter or expect me to know if each of their terms is used in the right context, they have come to the wrong place.
Unfortunately, it always seems that some sort of background knowledge is needed in order to understand the point of the paper. I usually ask the students what sort of audience they are supposed to be addressing, namely whether or not the people who will be reading this paper are already knowledgeable professionals in their fields or an ignorant bystander (like me). This especially becomes important, I have found, when students bring in papers for their English classes that are horribly convoluted with technical jargon and long terms that I have to skip over when I read aloud. I experienced a paper like this, when a mechanical major came in comparing automobile transmissions in his argumentative essay for English 2010. After reading the paper and still being unable to tell the difference between the two things he was arguing, I asked him if he thought that his teacher would be able to understand and follow his argument without having a background in the inner workings of cars. Realizing that his paper would probably go way over her head (just like it did mine) allowed him to see the logic in revising his paper so that it could be made clear for anyone to understand.
Although this approach might not work for papers that really are for professors who will know what the student means by their ten letter terms, for those papers that “cross over” into different academic fields, clarity is a must for understanding. Even if I don’t know exactly what the student means when they are discussing medical procedures for an illness I have never even heard of before, I can still find aspects within the paper that need improvement simply due to mistakes in writing. Although it is frustrating to not know everything, students have to be aware that writing center tutors are there to help with specific writing problems, not test whether or not their facts are right. Usually, if the mistake is blatantly obvious, I will point out to a student to double check their sources, but ultimately, the content of the paper is the responsibility of nobody else but the student’s.